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By Root 1319 0

He had already been to see his parole officer and the two of them were trying to find him another job. Saul Markowitz had already called the parole officer and had smoothed things over, so there wasn’t going to be any trouble. When Jack found the card he remembered that she had said something about getting him a job. He decided he would use it as an excuse to go see her. Maybe there would even be a job in it. But that was not why he was going to see her. He had not slept with a woman in two years, and the thought of her made him weak with desire. It was like getting out of San Quentin; first there was one life and you just got used to it and pretended that there was nothing else, and then suddenly you remembered all the other things that could be done, and the urgency became frantic, everything else blurred away. Jack bathed and dressed in his cheap slacks and sport coat, and then to burn away the excess nervous energy he walked all the way from Pine and Jones to Telegraph Hill. When he got to her apartment, after going up and down the wrong streets twice, he was steamy hot and angry, half-certain that she was not there, or not alone, and that he should have telephoned, or she would not remember him, or would remember him and cut him cold—but none of that was true. She opened the door and laughed in recognition and asked him in, and he walked past her into the apartment, his stomach muscles hard with tension, his face burning. He felt like a child who has come to beg some free candy from the grocer.

Eighteen

She was not beautiful, Jack decided; just very pretty. She had the high cheekbones, well-defined nose, and blue-black hair of an Indian, but her eyes were as blue and intense as his own, and her skin was pale rather than sallow. She wore her hair up to show her slender neck to its best advantage, and as she turned around for him to follow her into the apartment, Jack automatically looked down at her ankles. They, too, were slender. Jack fell in love with her. He was not sure exactly when he fell in love, but he always remembered thinking, as he glanced down at her ankles, “I’m in love. With her.” He felt ridiculous.

After three quick drinks and twenty minutes of tense (for Jack) conversation, they went to bed. The telephone interrupted the conversation twice; the first time a woman friend of Sally’s, the second time her date for that evening, and she, her eyes on Jack, said into the mouthpiece, “No, I’m sorry as hell. My damn period just started and I feel awful. I’m going to take a couple of Nebs and”—she winked at Jack—”go to bed with a fat novel.”

After she hung up, Jack said, “Did it?”

“Did what?”

“Did your period just start?”

“No, but it’s a beauty of an excuse, isn’t it? Takes the heart right out of them.” She stood in the middle of the room, looking down at Jack. He was seated cross-legged on a cushion beside the small fireplace. “You didn’t come over here to talk, did you?”

“Well, you said something about a job.”

She laughed. “That was just to get you over here. I don’t have any jobs. Unless you’d like to be paid for sleeping with me. Have you ever taken money for it?”

“I’ve never had an offer,” Jack said. He stayed on his cushion. “I’ve never met a chick like you, either.”

“I’m debauched,” she said. “The coachman got me in the back seat of the family phaeton when I was twelve; and from there on out it’s been all downhill.”

“Why do you talk such bullshit?” Jack was vaguely irritated. He had come over here to rape, not be seduced by a fast-talking whore. She had him off-balance and he did not like it. He felt inferior and young, and even intimidated by the expensive furnishings of the apartment.

“Why, isn’t all talk bullshit?” she asked. She had her hands on her hips, and her face was in shadow. “I’ve been waiting for you to say something obvious, but you don’t seem to know how. Don’t you know how to score with chicks like me? You’re supposed to talk in double entendres, and then come up behind me while I’m mixing the drinks, and put your hand on my fanny. Then I turn around, grunting like